Domestic Cappadocia.(New poems)(Poem)

 
Domestic Cappadocia 
 
   I 
 
   They seemed content enough, the married pair 
   who owned my charming cave hotel, 
   and ran the place commendably well, 
   solicitous yet casual, always there 
 
   when needed yet never hovering, 
   and often snatching (where they could) 
   quick private moments when they would 
   allow themselves some little couple thing 
 
   --a squeeze of hands, a whispered joke 
   or endearment, once even a furtive kiss-- 
   that made their life appear harmonious. 
   Until, that is, the night I awoke 
 
   at three o'clock to yells and cries 
   rumbling up from their rooms below; 
   sporadic at first and fairly low-intensity, 
   they became by five 
 
   continuous, hysterical, and loud, 
   culminating in a door flung wide, 
   the wife's wails further amplified, 
   the husband's now-threatening shouts, 
 
   her frantic steps across the floor, 
   his execrations, her disdain, 
   a slap, a crash, a howl of pain, 
   the throwing open of another door 
 
   and then its slamming shut, as she, 
   escaping the hotel, at last broke free. 
 
   II 
 
   Eruptions were the making of this place: 
   thirty million years ago, 
   volcanoes smothered its plateau 
   in ash that hardened to a carapace 
 
   of tuff, which then, over untold time, 
   the wind and water whittled and tweaked 
   into a landscape so unique, 
   grotesque, and bizarrely sublime 
 
   as to look conjured up by mescaline, 
   with fairy chimneys, as they're known 
   --eroded pillars of multihued stone-- 
   sprouting in their freakish thousands; 
 
   priapic yet mushroomy, 
   disposed in mazelike forests, they seem 
   a half-baked collaboration between 
   God, Freud, and Antonio Gaudi. 
 
   And its singularity does not end there: 
   the softness of the rock allowed 
   inhabitants to scoop and gouge 
   out spacious dwellings in midair, 
 
   and spurred the early Christians to go on 
   a binge of righteous burrowing, to honeycomb 
   the stacks with churches--frescoed, domed-- 
   and monasteries by the dozen, 
 
   their materials purely Miocene, 
   their style Cro-Magnon-cum-Byzantine. 
 
   III 
 
   Exploring Cappadocia the next day, 
   the row still ringing harshly in my ears, 
   I couldn't help but find its atmosphere 
   impinged on by the ricochets 
 
   of last night's matrimonial misery, 
   which seemed to carom off the valley walls 
   and echo down the barrel vaults, 
   until the whole place became for me 
 
   a massive metaphor for marriage, 
   its formations analogous, 
   in their towering ungainliness, 
   to the virtual topography that rage 
 
   and love and other shaping elements 
   carve out wherever man and wife 
   attempt to fuse within a common life 
   their separate energies, and to cement, 
 
   from each one's detritus and lapilli 
   and fractured ancient bedrock and far-flung tuff, 
   some joint conglomerate strong enough 
   to serve as matter ...